SUGGESTIONS AND DEBATES Sven E. Olsson WORKING-CLASS POWER AND THE 1946 PENSION REFORM IN SWEDEN A Modest Festschrift Contribution* The Great Social Democratic Celebration view of the development of the Swedish welfare state has to be repudiated and relegated to where it be- longs, the lush vegetations outside the open veld of scholarship.1 Obviously, the small states of the Far North are important cases in social scientific discourse over the character and development of the welfare state. In particular the long reign of Swedish Social Democracy, and maybe even more the exceptional strength of trade unions in Sweden, belong to the sociological wonders of contemporary capitalism. Industrial relations as well as social and labour market policies in Sweden have become a fashion in current social and historical analysis around the globe. Rather surprisingly, there exist few studies on the origins and historical development of welfare policies in Sweden. For example concerning pen- sion policy, an area in which Sweden in several respects was ahead of most * This article is part of the project "Developments and alternatives in Swedish Social Insurance Policy" funded by the Swedish Commission for Social Research (DSF 87/91). I am indebted to Ake Elmer, Olli Kangas, Rafael Lindqvist, Per Nystrom, Gunnar Olofsson, Joakim Palme, Gosta Rehn and Stefan Svallfors for their helpful comments and criticisms on the draft for this text. I am also grateful for the critique at the Sociology Department Seminar, University of Stockholm. Suzanne McMurphy corrected the draft and Patrick Hort made the final language corrections. 1 Therborn, G. (1983): "The Working Class, the Welfare State and Sweden", paper presented at the Social Policy seminar of the Swedish Sociological Association (Ladvik, 1985), p. 37, reprinted in P. Kettunen (ed.), Det nordiska i den nordiska arbetarrorelsen (Helsinki, 1986), pp. 1-75. Baldwin follows in the footsteps of Therborn and indeed singles out major contributors to the development of the Swedish welfare state in addition to those who are usually honoured. Although an appropriate foundation, considering we are living in 1989 - the centenary of the foundation of the Social Democratic Labour Party in Sweden - I think it is important to see the true proportions of this narrative. Thus, these pages may be labelled, to paraphrase Therborn, "a modest Festschrift contribution" (p. 28). International Review of Social History, XXXIV (1989), pp. 287-308 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 30 Sep 2021 at 14:19:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000009275 288 SVEN E. OLSSON industrial nations since early this century, the seminal work is still Ake Elmer's Folkpensioneringen i Sverige (The People's Pension in Sweden) published some thirty years ago.2 The major weakness of this thesis is its national focus, and the absence of a cross-national perspective. However, otherwise it is an outstanding analysis of the origins and social forces behind the Swedish pension system from late 19th up to mid-20th century. In Elmer's view, the background to the unanimous choice in 1913 of an all-encompassing, universalist pension scheme, instead of a worker's insur- ance, was the decisive political weight held by farmers and rural smallhold- ers. In contrast, the unanimosity behind the pension reform in 1946 had more complex reasons. Conventional wisdom holds that this was basically a Social Democratic affair. The Labour movement had since the 1930s be- come the main political factor, and had already from the 1920s tried to reform the pension system against stubborn Conservative resistance. The general election of 1936 with the pension issue in focus, proved victorious for the Social Democratic party, and a State Commission led by a leading Social Democratic social policy expert was appointed to carry out reform in all areas of social welfare. However, it is evident that Social Democracy was in no sense the obvious force behind the pension reform that followed in 1946. The labour move- ment was split when the State Commission made its proposals, and was reunited only after most other socio-political forces had made their choices. In Elmer's analysis, the pension decision was made in the interplay between on the one hand the Swedish Conservative party, now in favour of social reform, and the left-leaning emerging lobby organizations of pensioners on the other. Recently, the Harvard historian Peter Baldwin has started to publish the results from his comparative study of European pension policy. Among other things, he questions the validity of conventional wisdom regarding the Social Democratic impact on welfare state developments in Sweden.3 Despite the obvious merits and seriousness of his article "How socialist is solidaristic social policy?", his analysis of pension reform in Sweden in the mid-1940s must be seen in a broader intellectual context. I have had the good fortune to read the mimeograph version of Baldwin's dissertation. It is broad in scope, rich in detail, and sharp in focus. His conclusions are well argued and the whole work is a fine example of sensitive historical analysis.4 2 A. Elmer, Folkpensioneringen i Sverige (Malmo, 1960). 3 International Review of Social History, XXXIII (1988), pp. 121-147 [hereafter Bald- win, IRSH]. Cf. P. Baldwin, "The Scandinavian Origins of the Social Interpretation of the Welfare State", Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31 (1989), no. 1, pp. 3-24. 4 P. Baldwin, "The Politics of Social Solidarity and the Class Origins of the European Welfare State 1875-1975" (Harvard University, Department of History, 1987), mimeo [hereafter Baldwin, PSSCOEWS]. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 30 Sep 2021 at 14:19:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000009275 WORKING CLASS POWER AND THE 1946 PENSION REFORM IN SWEDEN 289 I highly appreciate and respect his ambition to write a non-Whiggish narrative, and both the discussion of the 1913 Pension law and the 1959 Superannuation law are nuanced interpretations of Swedish history. How- ever, I cannot avoid the impression that, in presenting the 1946 Swedish pension reform as a specifically Conservative effort for social solidarity, he overdoes his case.5 Generally speaking, Baldwin questions a classical axiom attributed to one of the founding fathers of the social sciences, namely Marx's thesis that the working class has only its chains to loose and is accordingly the only class whose interest is not "particular" but "universal"; in the end, workers' emancipation means the emancipation of all mankind. The Communist Manifesto held that the only class with a "total" societal interest is the proletariat, the wage-earners. Baldwin's dissertation opens with an illumi- nating general discussion of redistribution, solidarity and the Welfare State. In the article, the starting point is narrower, focusing on the issue that has caused some authors to note with astonishment that the Swedish Social Democrats were not united behind what posterity has come to regard as the most progressive pension proposal of the Scandinavian welfare state.6 The 5 Productivity at American universities, in particular the production of dissertations from the elite schools, has created a fundamental problem in the scientific community at large. The need to make a career in an extremely competitive academic market place, where success is founded on making a 'break through' in an overwhelming publishing milieu, forces the dissertation authors to press their points to the extreme as well as to adapt them to the theoretical conjuncture of the day. Invisible academic proof-work is superficially transformed into visible articles in scientific journals, the most prestigious form of publishing and the best means for providing advertisement for forthcoming books. Thus, while simplistic viewpoints are spread all over the field, the indispensable 'Socratic' dialogue between scholarly minds is put aside. Too much competition can be turned into a disadvantage. The threat of anti-intellectualism based on this orientation cannot be overlooked, sacrificing the generally high quality of American research, in particular historical research. I would like to add, that these remarks reflect my own ambiguity towards a system I had an extremely rewarding firsthand experience of as a Fulbright visiting scholar during academic year 1987/1988 at Mount Vernon College and the Brookings Institution, Washington D.C. Commenting upon these remarks, Per Nystrom reminded me that Gunnar Myrdal early on had noticed another bad habit in the US academic community: the abuse of citations from best friends and close colleagues (letter to the author 1989-01-26). 6 Concerning the astonishment among social policy experts at the apparent progressive- ness of the bourgeois parties, it is important to note that Baldwin misreads Elmer, ibid., IRSH, p. 137, n. 45. Elmer does not say that the Right's attitude "is the most difficult to explain", only that it is not possible for him to conclude whether it was purely tactical or a matter of principle (pp. 118-127). Elmer also stresses that he is speculating on this issue, but pays considerable attention to the principal arguments. However, he does not analyze in terms of rationality (a great merit in Baldwin's article), makes no reference to the Right's advocacy of white-collar pension interests, and does not investigate the sources to which Baldwin has had access (especially the archive of the Right party). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 30 Sep 2021 at 14:19:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.